As digital signal processor (DSP) speed and power increases over time, wireless communications system digital signal processing may utilize higher complexity approaches that were not feasible previously due to processing constraints.
For example, mobile stations may employ various new approaches to interference cancellation which effectively improves mobile station receiver sensitivity over legacy mobile stations.
In systems such as IS-2000 CDMA, a mobile station having improved receiver sensitivity will be capable of detecting and receiving pilot signals from a much larger subset of its neighbor list than would a legacy mobile. Such improved mobile stations would therefore consume additional Walsh code resources because channels from various neighboring base stations would be assigned to the mobile station for CDMA soft handover implementation.
Therefore, valuable network channel resources would be unnecessarily tied up, and the full capabilities of the improved mobile station receivers would not be effectively utilized.